


Thursday

by haztobegood



Series: Workday Wordplay [4]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Gen, Pranks and Practical Jokes, in an office
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-15
Updated: 2019-07-15
Packaged: 2020-06-29 06:32:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19824493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haztobegood/pseuds/haztobegood
Summary: Thursday: Louis can't find his stapler.Nothing less than mischief is to be expected when Niall, Liam, Zayn, Louis, and Harry spend forty hours a week in corporate hell. Welcome to One Direction Financial - The Right Direction for Your Money.





	Thursday

**Author's Note:**

> NOTE: This fic is part of a series. You should probably read the first three parts of this series before this fic.
> 
> Thanks to [kingsofsharedtats](https://kingsofsharedtats.tumblr.com/) for beta-ing this fic and thanks to [lululawrence](https://lululawrence.tumblr.com/) for organizing this challenge.
> 
> This is part of a Wordplay prompt challenge for the prompt "tin". To read the amazing fics that were written by the others on this prompt, [click here](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/tin_tin), and to see all fics written as part of the challenge (including years 1 and 2), [click here](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/wordplay_fic_challenge/works). You can also find the masterpost for this year’s challenge [here](https://wordplayfics.tumblr.com/post/185709101043/wordplay-2019-every-week-for-five-weeks-a-prompt).

Thursday is not going well. Louis would give anything to start the day over. Or better yet just go home and crawl into bed until tomorrow. After all tomorrow couldn't be worse than today has already been. 

So far, his morning has been a string of failures. Louis forgot to plug in his phone and it died. Without his alarm, he woke to Harry pounding on his door, ready to head off to work together. So, he pulled on his jeans from yesterday, grabbed a button up shirt from his closet, and tucked his unwashed hair under a beanie. It’d have to do. He skipped breakfast but luckily Harry had brought him a mug of tea. He was the best boyfriend. And then, as they walked to work, he tripped over an uneven patch of pavement and dropped the entire mug. The lid popped off and Louis watched helpless as his daily dose of caffeine leached into the pavement. 

The rest of the morning adds to his stress. He is busy with assignments piling up and deadlines getting closer. His to-do list seems endless. It doesn’t help that he is groggy and under caffeinated. 

Despite all the earlier failures, Louis manages to cross some things off his list. He’s already returned some emails and a phone call, wrapped up one of the assignments he was working on and is close to finishing another. It’s almost lunchtime and he needs to get this assignment turned into Chandra before he can eat. He does one final spell check of the twenty page document, makes sure all the text boxes are still in the right spots, and clicks print. 

He grabs the pages from the printer. His stomach grumbles on his way back to his desk. Just another minute until he’s free to lunch. He knocks the stacked pages against the desk to align the edges and then reaches for his stapler in the top drawer. 

It’s not there. 

Louis looks into the drawer. It should be there. But it’s not. He sweeps his hand to the back of the drawer, feeling for any stapler-like object. There is none. This is just another horrible event making his day unbearable. 

His stapler is missing. 

Technically it isn’t his stapler. It is just an office supply that he’d found in the supply closet during his first month at One Direction Financial. But it’s the only one that never jams. So Louis claimed it and always hid it in his desk drawer. 

But it isn't there. He knows he put it back yesterday and it should be there but it’s not. He just wants to finish this report so he can get some lunch. He sighs at the prospect of having to use one of the communal staplers by the printer. They’re sure to jam if Louis tries to use them. 

And then he remembers Niall threatening revenge for the footsie incident on Monday. Chandra had assigned the dreaded outreach report to Niall as punishment for the disruption. Louis did feel bad about it, but that didn’t make it okay for Niall to take his stapler. That was just too far. 

“Niall!” Louis storms over to his cubicle. 

Niall pulls an earbud out of his ear and looks at Louis with confusion. “What’s up, Tommo?”

“You took my stapler.” Louis points an accusing finger at Niall. “Where is it?”

“I don’t have your stapler.”

“I don’t have time for games Niall. I need to turn this report in before lunch. I have to get it stapled. Where is it?” 

“Honestly, mate, I don’t have it.” Niall throws up his hands. 

“Well, where’d you hide it then? I know you took it to get revenge for the Outreach Report.”

Niall laughs sardonically. “Trust me, if I did something to get back at you for the Outreach Report, it wouldn’t be as small as taking your stapler, Tommo.” 

“Well, fine,” Louis huffs. “But I still think you know where it is.” Louis stomps off, now in an even worse mood. 

He grabs the shitty stapler next to the printer. He lines up the corner of the stack of papers and prays to the office gods. He presses down. The staple bends crooked and only goes through the first few layers. “Fuck!” Louis whispers. He grabs the staple puller and removes it. Then he tries again. And again. He accumulates a small pile of bent staples. The corner of the report is nearly shredded. He tries one more time, and the staple twists again. He pulls the report from the stapler but it doesn’t budge. The bent staple is lodged in the stapler. 

“Fuck! Fucking stapler.” He tosses it on the desk with a forceful clang. 

Harry comes over. “Hey, what’s up babe?” 

“My stapler’s missing and this one’s shit.” Louis pouts exaggeratedly. 

Harry grabs the stapler and a paperclip. In just a few minutes, he gets the stapler unstuck. He takes the report from Louis and staples it neatly. “Here you go.”

Louis rolls his eyes. Louis doesn’t know how Harry managed to get the stapler to actually function properly. These office supplies truly hate him.

“Ready for lunch?” Harry asks.

“Sure, just let me drop this off at Chandra’s desk first.” 

“No problem.” Then, Harry walks over to Niall, “You coming to lunch too?” 

“Nah, go ahead without me. I’ve gotta wrap up this Outreach Report.” Niall motions to his computer screen.

“Alright. See you later.” Harry waves. Louis and Harry head down to the break room together.

When they return to their office thirty minutes later, Louis is in much better spirits. He’d gotten to eat some leftover Chinese take-out. And Liam and Zayn had invited them for a double date on Saturday. He is looking forward to smoking Liam and Zayn at the new mini golf course. He’ll hold the win over their heads for months. Bragging rights are everything in their friend group. Maybe if Niall returns his stapler he’ll even invite Niall and Shawn to come along too. 

Harry leads them down the hall to their office. He stops suddenly and Louis walks into his back, steadying himself with his hands on Harry’s waist. 

“Oh my god,” Harry says in disbelief.

“What? What’s happened Hazza?” Louis squeezes his right hand on Harry’s waist, trying to get him to move out of the way so he can see what’s going on.

Harry steps aside and Louis sees it immediately as he steps forward. Louis and Harry’s cubicles are completely wrapped in tin foil. From their computer screens and keyboards, to the picture frames on Harry’s desk. Even the individual pens are each wrapped. The shiny foil is wrapped meticulously over every movable object on the two desks. It’s impressive really. Louis is flabbergasted, they’d only been gone for a half hour. 

“How?” Harry sounds stunned as he begins picking up random silvery objects and turning them over in his hands. Louis glares at the state of his desk.

“Niall!” Louis shouts across the office.

“Tommo! How’s it going?” Niall comes around the corner, phone poised to snap photos of Harry and Louis in front of their tin foil desks. 

“Niall, how in the world?” Harry asks as he opens a drawer to find that even those contents had been wrapped. No object was spared from the tin foil fate. 

“I have my ways. Plus there was a sale on tin foil.” Niall laughs.

“But how did you manage to wrap everything? We weren’t gone that long,” Louis says.

“He enlisted the forces!” Kate comes out from her own cubicle, smug grin on her face. “Of course, us girls couldn’t refuse to gang up against you two when Niall let us in on the plan.” 

Kate, Margaret, Sarah, and Teresa all join around Niall, taking power stances. The four ladies resemble Charlie’s Angels, if the guns were replaced by rolls of tin foil.

“You have to admit, we did an excellent job!” Margaret points her foil roll toward Louis and jabs him lightly in the chest with it. 

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll admit, I’m impressed.” Louis shrugs. He takes another look around his desk, cataloging the damage. He’ll be too distracted by the shiny foil if he doesn’t unwrap everything before he gets back to work. Guess the rest of his to-do list is on hold for the rest of the afternoon. 

“Maybe you’ll think twice next time before causing problems,” Niall says before returning to his own, foil free desk. 

Louis and Harry begin the painstaking process of unwrapping every item. The recycling can fills up quickly with the balled up sheets. The foil crinkles noisily and there’s the risk of getting cut from the foil’s edges. It’s tedious work. Louis finally uncovers his computer screen, mouse, and keyboard and feels like he’s making progress. He has moved on to unwrapping each pen in the mug when he’s interrupted.

“Hey, Louis,” Teresa says. “I hope you don’t mind, I borrowed your stapler earlier this morning. I had a lot of packets to put together.” She sets the stapler on his desk and walks away. 

Louis glares at the stapler. Then he picks it up and places it in his drawer. 

He gets back to the tin foil removal, letting his mind wander to various ways he could inconvenience Niall after he’s finished the Outreach Report. After all, he can’t resist a few harmless office pranks between friends.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! [Here](https://haztobegood.tumblr.com/post/185841867152/workday-wordplay-series-by-haztobegood-nothing) is a rebloggable tumblr post for the series.


End file.
